ScamSurvivors is going to change to a “pay to view” business model.

Well we all knew it was going to happen sooner rather than later.  There are two major changes coming to ScamSurvivors.  Come the start of 2017 our forum will have both free to view and pay to view content.  It’s going to be a lot of work, but it will mean that the site will become a revenue source for me.  All of our thread titles that mention the name of the person whose images have been stolen will become invisible to the casual readers of our site.  Also included will be the email address and phone number of the scammer if we have it.  All this for the bargain price of just $9.99 a month.  Another implementation will be that anyone subscribing will be able to see the details of anyone posting.  This will mean that, should a post be made by someone that is considered unfair, slanderous or just plain “not a nice thing to say”, for that $9.99 a month you’ll be able to contact them with a request to remove the information.  We hope people understand the reasons behind this move and will support is in this new venture.

Of course that whole previous paragraph is 100% Grade A Bullshit brought on by several incidents we’ve seen recently.  We have never and will never charge anyone for what we do here.  We offer “free, non judgmental help and advice” and it’s a credo we strongly believe in.  Not everyone else does though.

A long time ago we saw a site that was actually charging people 10 dollars to call them to discuss their scammer.  More recently we’ve seen sites that hide information from everyone until they subscribe to their “monthly plan”.  Let’s think about this for a moment.  Someone has just lost every penny they have to a scammer, and the only way they can get help is to pay even more money – money they don’t have after just being scammed.  It’s something we can in no way agree with and would never work with or endorse anyone who does.

Likewise, we’ve heard recently how another antiscam site was posted up elsewhere as a scam.  We get that sometimes people will try to badmouth sites like us.  It’s all part and parcel of what we do.  Earlier this year I was even accused of taking “backhanders” from the dating site industry.  Completely untrue of course.  Here’s the difference though.  The owner of aa419 (the site that has been wrongly accused of being a scam) messaged the owner of the site the report about them was on and – you can read what happened in their own words.  It’s really quite shocking.

So how do we sum this up?  Do the actions of these people make them just as bad as the scammers they claim to be fighting against?  Is what they’re doing right, and they’re justified in making money from any situation.  Here’s my opinion.  Our server costs us a lot of money each month due to constant DDoS attacks on us by the scammers trying to get ScamSurvivors shut down.  We still manage to pay the bills without having to hide anything from public view though.  It’s not easy but we manage it.    Information should be freely available as without doing so, people  aren’t going to be able to find the help they so desperately need at that time and are going to fall for scams.  I sure as hell wouldn’t want that on my conscience.  Also for the aa419 incident, well that’s plainly ridiculous and I’m disgusted with it.